


No more hiding from yourself

by queen_ypolita



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: 2000-3000 words, Community: lgbtfest, Marauders' Era, POV Second Person, teenage angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-09
Updated: 2010-05-09
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:15:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,785
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queen_ypolita/pseuds/queen_ypolita
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"For Merlin's sake Sirius, I know this year's been tough for you, but no, you'll always have to let Snape's little comments get to you. Why couldn't you put some of that energy into all those girls that can't take their eyes off you or something?" It's time Sirius stopped hiding from his confusion and did some hard thinking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No more hiding from yourself

**Author's Note:**

> Written for lgbtfest 2010, prompt 1569: _Harry Potter, Sirius Black, never looking back at all the girls ogling him is less to seem indifferent and more because their glances don't register._

"For Merlin's sake Sirius, I know this year's been tough for you, but no, you'll always have to let Snape's little comments get to you. Why couldn't you put some of that energy into all those girls that can't take their eyes off you or something?"

You blink. You've never seen Remus quite so angry and you're hesitant to break his flow. But you have to ask, "What girls?"

Remus snorts. "Half the girls at Hogwarts above third year, I should think. Everyone near you risks tripping over them these days. Yes, I know you can't be a Black without making most of that haughty indifference, but I thought it wasn't supposed to stop you from seeing and noticing, even if you're not supposed to show it."

He's not wrong, but then again, five years is long enough to get intimately acquainted with all the shades of the haughty, indifferent Black expressions. It's not that you've completely missed that people are stealing glances at you, but if you ever paid them any attention, the motives you assigned to them were different. You mostly thought they were part and parcel of being, with James, the chief mischief-maker at Hogwarts, which obviously meant you were worth ogling at length. And they were girls. Remus must see your expression change. "Oh," he says, more quietly than before. "Does that mean you might take notice and look a little bit less haughty, if it was boys looking...? So the thing about James...?"

"What thing about James?" you ask, trying to win some time to avoid answering his questions because it would involve thinking about some things you suspect, no, you _know_ you've been avoiding for some time now.

Remus sighs. "Well, you, having a massive crush on James. I thought it was something tangled up with you running away from home and his parents taking you in and you having him all for yourself and his crush on Evans becoming even more painfully obvious, until, I think, you decided you were brothers."

You blush and nod, it's more or less true, although you hadn't realised Remus had seen so much. At least he doesn't sound disgusted, which is something you store for later reference.

"But that's not the point," Remus continues, in a harsh tone very unlike him, "what I was trying to say, ever since you three became Animagi, that you actually did it, for the first time in years you didn't have something to take up all your time and your brain. You suddenly had more time to brood on things, seeing you weren't putting that extra time into falling off your broomstick, or having serial crushes on the girls way out of your league like Peter did. Except you didn't even brood, really, because your clever solution to my problem also gave you a very special way to escape your thoughts when they got too hard for you, you could transform, chase cats and think happy doggy thoughts."

Remus pauses for breath, leaning against a dusty desk. He looks so pale and tired you're not quite sure how he's still standing. "So you don't think, can't handle thinking, can't handle Snape being his usual barbed and nosy self, and you spare no thought for me, of what it would have done to me if I had harmed him. Not just in terms of being able to stay here, or trying to avoid being put down like a nasty beast. You've seen my transformations, you know bloody well what it takes to keep it in check, and you know me, you know I'd rather die than put anyone else through this. Not him, not anyone."

He pulls up his sleeves and shows you his fresh scratches and bites. The marks are tidy after Madam Pomfrey's care, but they're much worse than they have been in months.

"Next time your mouth runs faster than your brain, and I'm pretty sure there will be a next time, I want you to remember this. I'm not your secret weapon for unsettling people who needle you too successfully, I'm supposed to be your friend, and I'm supposed to be able to trust you with my secrets. After last night, I'm not sure I can, again."

"But I would never do anything like that again," you burst out. Remus raises his eyebrows.

"You were never supposed to do it this time either. I know thinking before you speak doesn't come very easily to you unless you're conscious of playing it like a Black, but I want you to try. And I want you to take some time from your undoubtedly busy summer of devising pranks and dodging Bludgers with James to sit down and think very hard about the things you've been trying to avoid thinking for the past few months."

You meet his eyes and start to apologise again. Remus cuts them short.

"Sirius, I don't want your apologies. Or assurances that you'd never do something like this again. I know you. You might not have reached quite these heights of thoughtless cruelty before, but something like this is part and parcel with what you do when you don't think. You can say how sorry you are three thousand times, but it's not going to make me trust you again. Seeing you understand what you've nearly done could help there. So I'd rather you thought a little about how and why you're here now, apologising to me for nearly having me maul someone into shreds. And do take your time with that."

He gets up and leaves without another glance at you. The door slams behind him. You didn't think you could feel any worse than you already did. You were wrong.

The thing is, Remus is kind of right. Becoming an Animagus turned out to give much more than just a way to be there for Remus. It also gets you into places you wouldn't be able to go as Sirius, and an escape from being Sirius when human thoughts get too confusing. It's not that they completely disappear when you're a dog (you don't think you'd be able to turn back into Sirius if they did), but they don't feel as important.

And the past year has been kind of shitty by any objective measure (although you're not sure you should be talking about objective measures when it's all about very personal things). You spent the last summer's holidays rowing with your parents over _your_ failings as a dutiful son and person worthy of the name Black and over _their_ narrow minds and stupid principles. It's not that you hadn't been provoking them a little (you still smile at the memory of the sight of your mother spluttering at the cheap Muggle posters you put up using a very clever adaptation of permanent sticking charm), but it certainly wasn't always you.

You might have hoped to get away from the rows and everything else to do with your family when you returned to Hogwarts, but thanks to regular letters and the occasional Howler when your parents thought you weren't reading their letters (you weren't but Regulus was, and gleefully acted as a message-bearer) the rows didn't stay within the secure walls of Number Twelve Grimmauld Place. Your brother and your cousins knew about them, which meant that half the Slytherins got to hear about them, which meant that Snivellus had unending source of ammunition to annoy you (not that he needed any, really, he was naturally annoying).

Then things rather boiled over on Christmas Eve and you took off, for good, before they had a chance to throw you out (it might not have happened immediately, there were appearances to be kept up, but it would have happened, sooner or later). There was a shouting match colourful enough that rumours that flew around Hogwarts in January never quite did it justice. And what had tipped your mother over that time was just a throwaway comment, that as far as you were concerned, being a Black just wasn't that important. You had said other things along the same lines many times before, and you're not sure why it suddenly mattered so much.

You'd been relieved to get away. The utter normality of the Potters that Christmas had been very soothing, had made you feel almost normal and happy for a change. If it hadn't been about the thing about James, you think it might have been perfect, but you have to admit that you're not unhappy how things worked out.

Yes, that was another thing that had reached a boiling point over Christmas hols. You'd been noticing James in a different way all the more often, wanting to be the most important person in James's life but feeling increasingly second to James's crush on Evans and Quidditch and all the other million things going on in James's life, and, what you felt worst about, the way he featured in your fantasies made you feel almost dirty. Being able to transform and escape from all those thoughts was a huge relief. But sometimes that was hard too, with James (and Remus, now that you think about it) more willing to play-fight with the dog and pet and scratch it in a way they'd never dream of touching you as Sirius, or any other boy. (And if you're being painfully honest with yourself for a change, you'd exploited that willingness just a little.) After you'd run away and James's parents took you in, it had been overwhelming, with James there all the time, concerned and comforting, and you'd had wanted nothing more than to make the most of that closeness. But you had kept your hands to yourself and stopped yourself from blurting it out, from fear of losing it all.

James had confronted you about it at the end of Christmas hols. You still blush scarlet with embarrassment thinking about it, but James had been right and had been able to put it in a way that had made you feel better about it. You had been best friends since first week of first year, now you were brothers, and nothing and nobody was ever going to change that. You can honestly say it's better that way. But it didn't solve all your problems.

After Christmas, you'd tried hard to find something else to occupy your mind but with little success. In first year, you and James had mastered every single spell in the Standard Book of Spells, Grade 1 by Christmas, and had been able to devote yourselves to perfecting them for mischief. Until you worked out Remus's secret, that is. Once the initial frustration at not being able do anything to make it easier for him had evaporated, you'd embarked on a search that eventually led you to the idea of Animagi and trying to work out how to do it, which had involved hours upon hours in the library, and even more hours trying out things somewhere out of sight. Remus was right, it had absorbed all the excess time and energy and brain power you had left over from homework and mischief-making. Not having that felt strange. Someone else might have thrown themselves into OWL revision early, but you hadn't ever needed to work very hard to do well, and achieving OWL standard in any of your subjects was a doddle next to Animagus transformations and superb pranks. You didn't even have Quidditch to distract you, like James had (not that James had needed new distractions).

So Remus was right about your useless year. There, you think, you've now thought about things and can acknowledge that you've been lazy and confused and a proper coward. You've faced Dumbledore and McGonagall after pranks that got just ever so slightly out of hand, like you faced them last night, and you've stood tall and straight and proud, just like a Black, giving nothing away, judging the situation carefully, knowing when to act contrite, when to spare your words, when to apologise, when to play ignorant. But you've not been brave enough to face yourself for a long time.

You're Sirius Black and you've just betrayed your friend's confidence and exposed his secret to someone you despise. You also nearly had two people killed, one of them your best friend who was trying to stop things from getting completely out of hand, and even if you don't think a dead Snivellus would be a loss to the wizardkind, you do finally understand what Remus was trying to tell you earlier. You've been stupid and arrogant and frightened. You hid behind the Black haughtiness, forgetting that it's a mask that's meant to protect you but not stop you being observant, seeing everything there's to see even if you pretend not to notice.

You think about what Remus said about girls ogling you. You meant it when you said you hadn't really noticed. Everybody at Hogwarts had always been looking at you when they thought you didn't see, and you had put on your best haughty Black performance to all of them except James and Remus and Peter (and sometimes even for them, usually when it was about something to do with your vile, nasty family). But you'd seen so many looks directed at you in the last couple of years that were laced with malice, ones trying to work out which pieces of outrageous pureblood network gossip were true that you'd forgotten looks could be different.

But you also didn't see the looks because, like Remus said, it was mostly girls, and you just weren't interested. Although you haven't really put that into words before it's one of the things you instinctively been hiding from. You used to think maybe it was your family's insistence on only ever siring pureblood offspring with verified pureblood family trees going back at least five hundred years (preferably more) and all the associated warnings you'd been hearing about not wasting the seed and not tainting yourself with someone out there to trap you for the past three years or so that was putting you off girls. Which is silly, really, because you don't believe in all that pureblood crap, and never have. After running away, you've started realising you might have left the house, and your parents, but parts of them didn't leave you. It occurs to you now that someone else might have rebelled by flaunting a relationship with a Muggle-born witch, like Evans, but you can honestly say you didn't think of it before now. Maybe it's a good thing it hadn't, it could have been an even bigger mess.

But the other thing that Remus suggested, that maybe you'd noticed if it had been boys looking. Something about that makes you excited in the way that the knowledge about Hogwarts female population wanting you doesn't. You knew that, of course, after the thing about James you'd had to ask yourself if it meant something, if you were queer. But it was one of the things you had resolutely tried to avoid thinking about. It's not like you, really, to hide from everything, and you can imagine someone like you wearing the label with pride. Why you haven't seen that before you don't know... but then you can hear what Snivellus and your brother and cousins and their friends would say, all the sneers and the insults, and you wonder if anything could ever be worth putting up with that. It sounds like a recipe for spending all your evenings and weekends in detention for losing control and resorting to hexes and it would be just tragic to waste all that time in the company of teachers when you'd rather be planning pranks with James and Remus and Peter. But then you imagine the look on your mother's face when the gossip finally catches up with her, and you cannot help but laugh, after all she's done to try to stamp out everything that makes you Sirius and to mould you into what she wants you to be, that would be an ultimate triumph for you, something she can't erase no matter what she does. Yes, maybe you can face all you've feared after all.

Suddenly you feel very hungry and tired after a night with no sleep. Maybe facing your fears isn't as bad as you had begun to think it was, and resolve not to take advantage of Padfoot quite so often. You're Sirius Black, and you can face anything, do anything. You can ignore the girls and notice the boys and flaunt it just a little, and face whatever comes out of it. It might not even be all bad.


End file.
